Early automotive vehicle design had, as a goal, the object of providing a transportation alternative to a horse-and-buggy, with passenger comfort as a secondary consideration, at best. Vehicle design has advanced to a state in which occupant comfort and convenience, sometimes called ergonomics or human factors, is on at least an even par with the transportive aspects of a vehicle. This evolution has been driven by the availability of new technologies, including instrument panel clusters, adjustable steering wheels and columns, vehicle electronics, and movable seats, to mention only a few. With the addition of each new technological application to the automotive vehicle environment, however, comes additional complexity in packaging the various occupant appurtenances to best achieve both design and ergonomic functionality.
To meet this packaging task, current practice relies on various methods to determine whether a proposed design meets human factors requirements. Typically, a proposed design is analyzed in two-dimensions which requires many "cuts" of a drawing. A three-dimensional "buck" is also used to give a better overall view of the design, but such physical representations are expensive, time consuming, and difficult to modify for a subsequent design. Since there may be many individual components which affect occupant comfort and convenience, the tasks associated with capturing all of the required human factors packaging requirements are daunting. For example, a single rimblock study, which determines viewable parts of an instrument panel from a vehicle driver perspective, can require 4-6 hours to complete. In total, performing human factors studies typically requires many weeks under current practice, assuming the availability of experienced analysts to conduct all of the individual studies.
An additional problem with current design practice is that it leaves room for errors, due to the complex instructions required to perform the studies. Current design practice also is inflexible in that a change in one component, even a minor component, requires all human factors studies to be redone, resulting in greater expense and delay of design completion.